More electric cars rolling into Vancouver
Posted December 22, 2011 7:46 am.
This article is more than 5 years old.
VANCOUVER (NEWS1130) – The City of Vancouver will be rolling out more than two dozen electric cars next year. It’s all a part of the plan to get voters to follow suit.
Climate Programs Engineer Malcolm Shields says the city is replacing older vehicles from its fleet with greener ones.
“The city feels if we want our community to do that, we have to lead by example and so we’re looking for aggressive ways to reduce the GHG emissions from our own city operations while still maintaining fiscal prudency. “
Currently, City Hall has 5 electric cars and sometime next year will add 25 new electric vehicles by the end of 2012.
“It’s just the first wave that we’re starting to look at now and as of next year, there will be a lot more rolling forward. In the city we’d like 15 percent of new sales to be electric or hybrid electric,” explains Shields.
Those new electric vehicles will be for high mileage use in parking enforcement and Park Board departments.
“These vehicles are coming into the fleet to replace those that have reached the end of their service life. It’s not an addition of more vehicles to the fleet. It’s purely a replacement of what would be leaving the fleet anywhere and replacing them with something that has a much greater environmental benefit to us.”
Shields adds the cost to lease the vehicles is the same as gas powered cars, the only slight increase comes in the form of electric car infrastructure.
According to the Shields, in the long term the benefit wills outweigh the costs.
